“What makes you so sure?” “One can tell. It isn’t a thing one can put into words. You know by a kind of intuition.” “Know what?” “That a certain kind of person can never have had any but a certain kind of standard.” She gave me another of those quietly mischievous glances. “I’ll tell you what she said to me one day not long ago. She said she’d only known one man in her life—known him well, that is—of whom she was sure that he was a thoroughbred to the core.” “But you admitted at the beginning that that kind of conviction is a danger.” “It would be a danger if her friends couldn’t bear her out in believing it to be justified.” Unable to face any more of this subtle flattery, I was obliged to let the subject drop. The lunch was like any other lunch. As an unimportant person at a gathering where every one knew every one else more or less intimately, I was to some extent at liberty to follow my own thoughts, which were not altogether happy ones. For telling what I had to tell, the necessity had grown urgent. What was lacking, what had always seemed to be lacking, was the positive opportunity. This I resolved to seek; but suddenly I found it before me. This was toward the middle of the afternoon, when the party had broken up. It had broken up imperceptibly by dissolving into groups that strolled about the lawns and descended the long flights of steps leading to the beach below. As I had not been seated near Miss Barry at table, it was no more than civil for me to approach her when the party was on the veranda and the lawn. Our right to privacy was recognized at once by a withdrawal of the rest of the company. It was probably assumed that I was to be the fourth in the series of experiments of which Jim Hunter and Stephen Cantyre had been the second and the third; and, though my fellow-guests might be sorry for me, they would not intervene to protect me. Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the olive-green scrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery glinting of water. The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said, languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too, and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”